HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

xrt

33 karma · joined December 17, 2011

submissionscomments
xrt··on Show HN: Card – An interactive CSS3 credit card form
thank you for this. i've never understood why credit cards are printed w/ spaces between the numbers, presumably to reduce transcription errors, but 99.9% of web forms force you to enter the number without any spaces.
xrt··on Make Your Own Grid Paper
This is a doddle in PostScript. http://www.jasonpratt.org/software/graphpaper/
xrt··on Results of the GitHub Investigation
Think this might make those "Fork me on GitHub" badges a little less popular? I sincerely hope so.
xrt··on Better bash in 15 minutes
I really hate writing things in reverse, but a decent style in Bash is to put everything in functions, w/ a main() at the top:

    #! /usr/bin/env bash
    set -e -u
    bar='bar'
    
    main() {
      foofunction
    }
    
    foofunction() {
      echo 'foo'
      echo $bar
    }

    main "$@"
xrt··on Alan Kay's Reading List
LISP 1.5 manual (MITPress)
xrt··on Less Commonly Used Unix Commands
It would be very useful to delineate this list by command type and availability. The ones I wanted to check out (ndiff, rs, iftop, mtr, ...) must be in packages, since they don't respond in either OS X or vanilla Debian.
xrt··on What's new in Unicode 7.0?
So a middle finger gets fewer downvotes than a technical commentary. awesome.
xrt··on What's new in Unicode 7.0?
They lost me when they went to 21 bits.
xrt··on Unix Commands I Wish I’d Discovered Years Earlier
The -3 arg is not available on OS X. Odd, since it's been in BSD Unix since forever. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=cal
xrt··on Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language
My favorite example. The chosen answer to the "Where's Waldo?" solution is 7 lines long. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-wal...
xrt··on Navigating the Postmodern Python World
I should think OCaml or SML should be added to the mix. Neither has Async built in, but the other points are handled quite well. http://ocaml.org/description.html
xrt··on Hosting git repositories on your VPS
Why was I not made aware of this sooner? $10 for 1-10 users? Nice. (also not affiliated)
xrt··on Mac Pro
The design reminds me a bit of my "sunflower" iMac, which was a really nice machine.
xrt··on DBX
dbx is a company and a noise reduction format. It competed w/ Dolby. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbx_(noise_reduction)
xrt··on Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language
It's been sad to watch Markdown eclipse Textile http://txstyle.org in popularity. Textile provides a more complete mapping to HTML than Markdown, while remaining easy to use.

Its primary flaw is translating line breaks into HTML line breaks. Per the article's criticisms, it too lacks a formal spec and supports embedded HTML.

xrt··on Programs should be Small
Beyond complexity management, breaking a design into many small programs opens it up to a rich set of well-known and proven OS services. Things like hardware memory protection, multi-processor support, queues, mutexes, monitoring, and cross language support. I'll take Unix over some language+standard library _any day_.
xrt··on A List of Sublime Text 2 Hotkeys
Is there any way to view the .textile files rendered properly w/in Github? They are rendering the same as raw for me. Am I missing something?
xrt··on How Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, Works
> Also, I want to know how to make Evernote better! Email me and let me know.

I've got a few ideas. What is your email address?

xrt··on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server will have Git support
Awesome. Any chance you could update the C compiler to something post-C89?
xrt··on Why you should never use two spaces after a period
Robin Williams devotes a chapter of her book, "The PC is not a Typewriter", on the subject. She concurs.

http://www.amazon.com/Pc-Not-Typewriter-Robin-Williams/dp/09...

xrt··on Pen and Paper
Bic, Med, Blue, 29c. Best pen ever.
xrt··on In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML
How is COS separate from PostScript? It looks like a straight PS dictionary.
xrt··on Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class
I genuinely thought this was put together as a rather good joke until I studied it a bit.

  Is the object managed by this factory a singleton?
xrt··on Why I am tired of writing pull requests
Meta: This is a problem w/ HNs layout, but using a fixed pitch line of 144 chars makes the entire page wide enough to require horizontal scrolling. Correction: for Chrome, just the comment, for IE9 the entire page. Is there a bullet list markup?
xrt··on One of Apple’s Best Ideas Ever — Made Worse
jibe
xrt··on Linux Played a Crucial Role in Discovery of 'Higgs boson'
The network stack? Well, I guess that's been removed, but it took a while...
xrt··on Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter review
Wouldn't it be better to simply have a Gig-E port?
xrt··on Would Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator?
Actually, one of his houses was less than a mile from Larry's place.
xrt··on A creative presentation: Two Czech students looking for a summer job in SV
Are you both wild and crazy by any chance?
xrt··on Google: Let it snow
xsnow anyone, like 20 years ago? Awesome!